The Third Party: An Exhibition in Three Acts
November 11, 2010 – January 24, 2011
Platform China Contemporary Art Institute | Beijing, CN
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curator :: Beatrice LEANZA
exhibition design :: LI Naihan
The tripartite exhibition The Third Party (see The Third Party [curatorial]) explores the shaping relationships between narrative and aesthetic objects to foreground an inquiry in the realm of the ‘ordinary’ specific to the Chinese context. By juxtaposing different acts of description as represented in the work of a group of artists from across the country, the three portions of the exhibition place three different possibilities of narrative articulation. From the most intimate and solipsistic to the collective and participatory, they intend to break off the circuit of signification and knowledge between work and world, and rather expose the processes by which meaning is produced and attributed.
The exhibition is visually designed to present the works of the individual artists as self‐pronounced archival displays. While each act features a different group of artists, some of the works will varyingly evolve in the course of the three months or come to completion at an arbitrary moment in time. Responsive to the idea of the exhibition as a ‘field report’, one that escapes the structural preordering of objectifying analysis, a special architectural installation called The Beehive has been devised by LI Naihan. Constituted by units of hexagonal cardboard boxes variously repurposed to be adopted and adapted according to the works, The Beehive creates a deceptive information system that allows for the temporary arrangement of both things and the ‘emotional ecologies’ attached to them. It allows the works to drift in their own visual and material reality while making it possible for us to see them as disjunctions of a larger contextual narrative.
An Exhibition in Three Acts
November 11, 2010 – January 24, 2011
Platform China Contemporary Art Institute | Beijing, CN
curator :: Beatrice LEANZA
And what would art have to do with this? What would it give to be seen? Cause to be seen? Let us see? Let us cause to be seen? Or let itself be shown?
Jacques DERRIDA, The Truth in Painting
The Third Party is an exhibition conceived to unfold in three consecutive sessions in Platform China project space. Each approximately lasting twenty days, the three moments of this show are devised to disclose their conceptual and thematic associations as in a chain‐reaction, where the individual frameworks are determined by the critical inputs presented within a preceding one. The Third Party explores the shaping relationships between narrative and aesthetic objects to foreground an inquiry in the realm of the ‘ordinary’ specific to the Chinese context. It does so by mobilizing overarching frames of reference and critique currently at play, be those aesthetic or historical, through three analytical environments tackling respectively issues of self-historicization, witnessing/archiving and collaboration. The progressive movement of the show somehow attends to the patterns of identification inherent in the day‐to‐day business of learning and communicating of and through our bodies, spaces, feelings as we build an understanding of reality and ultimately our position within it. The Third Party therefore concerns itself with matters of mapping, the tracing of patterns of both presence and absence and the ideological constitution of subjects.
The Third Party was chosen as “Best of 2011” in ArtForum, December 2011.
ACT 1. How to Be Alone (or Nowhere else am I safe from the question: why here?) | November 11 – 30, 2010
ACT 2. The Stranger | December 9 – 27, 2010
ACT 3. The Third Party – A Group Celebration! | January 7 – 24, 2011
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September 2010
BAO office | Caochangdi village, CN
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interior and furniture design :: NAIHANLI & Co.
In fact, it all starts with a leak.
Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy – Architecture and the Visual Arts
The House of Leaves is a three-story red brick building covering 560 sqm that comprises a private (or semi-private) apartment on its top floor, a working station (BAO office) on the second floor and a large public living room.
The house as an intimate image is ultimately an impossible space. It is a reeling archive of processes that keep on changing and being drawn towards the irrationality of depths and new beginnings, deprived, as it becomes, of the certainty of relative topography. In intimate spaces things are imagined and set in motion in timeless interiors, they are stretched between memory and anticipation, between the idlesse of thoughts and the intentionality of objects, bound to the dual function of reality and unreality. So of change and new beginnings. Or of meaningful in-betweenness.
We move back to where we were. Things have changed, the village has changed. It has gone from 场 [chǎng, cháng] – an open field, a generic space, a place of gathering, to 厂 [chǎng] – a workshop, a factory, a place of productive purpose. At least, the new signage off the fifth ring road says so. Caochangdi, once dark and subterranean, is now well lit and architecturally sound.
Somewhere between those two signs dwells an image of poetic comfort, an emotional retreat. On one side the open-endedness and idleness of freeplay — that primordial function of inhabiting that separates us from both past and reality, where things and time can be squandered, undone, dissipated; on the other, a site of function, a place of scheduled objectivity and self-awareness.
The House of Leaves sits amidst said confines. It takes its name from the genre-defining novel written by Mark Z. DANIELEWSKI. A typographically labyrinthine book tiered through multiple narrators and triggered by continuous détournements of filmic narrative, it is designed in an architecture of knowledge that both defines and defies itself. The book is a house, about a movie of a house, whose interior changes unexpectedly further and deeper than its exterior. As it’s been observed, it is impossbile to read The House of Leaves the same way twice. It is meant to be an impossible space, and it should be explored like one. What constitutes and builds throughout the act of reading is ultimately a private space of imaginific derangement where multiple cross-references leak from phrases to extruded paragraphs and page-long footnotes – the actual house arises from within the fractures of its building process.
Seemingly this House of Leaves appears as an architectural analogue of what we have set our practice to be ever since we founded BAO Atelier in 2006.
CDM 2010 – Rizzoli Beijing
April 14 – 19, 2010
Salone Internazionale del Mobile – Milan Design Week
Design Library | Milano, IT
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graphic project and media kit :: ourwork.is
The catalogue for the CDM 2010 project was integrated to the media pack as a detachable booklet inclusive of articles about the Chinese design market, curatorial text and all featured products with technical charts and descriptions indexed by category (furniture, lights, fashion, graphics, sound and art editions).
CDM 2010 – Rizzoli Beijing
April 14 – 19, 2010
Salone Internazionale del Mobile – Milan Design Week
Design Library | Milano, IT
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graphic design and media kit :: ourwork.is
China Design Market (CDM) has been born out of the collaborative efforts of Rizzoli Beijing/Abitare China magazine and BIDC (Beijing Industrial Design Center), with the support of the Lenovo Group. It was launched in 2008 as a cooperative platform for the promotion and enhancement of strategic synergies between the international design world and China. CDM 2010 included three main projects, including an exhibition, a special project realized in collaboration with Alessi (curated by Gary CHAN) and a showcase of the homegrown Chinese Red Star Award dedicated to industrial design.
Art direction included curating and coordination of all projects, concept & editing of the catalogue and media kit.
main organizers :: Rizzoli Beijing (RCS Media Group), BIDC (Beijing Industrial Design Centre)
in collaboration with :: Lenovo & Alessi
art direction :: BAO Atelier
The Secret Life of Things in Chinese Art and Design
April 14 – 19, 2010
Salone Internazionale del Mobile – Milan Design Week | project of CDM 2010
Design Library | Milano, IT
curator :: Beatrice LEANZA
exhibition design :: LI Naihan
catalogue design :: ourwork.is
Introduced within the framework of CDM 2010, the exhibition is conceived as a wondrous journey into contemporary object-scapes through the creative processes of a young generation of 30 Chinese independent designers, artists and studios as a way to explore both formally and conceptually the micro-fields of everyday life. These formal experimentations often resort to natural materials and textiles, paper, wood and bamboo, and to different ways for revisiting traditional techniques, formats and forms of image-making, therefore rethinking the way they continue to mediate a sense of proximity to the social, the subjective and the philosophical. In bringing together these experiences the present appears as an ahistorical shelter where illusion and artifice are granted an essential purpose that is to induce us in a state of suspended reading, “native in some way to the primary function of inhabiting” (G. BACHELARD). With the aim to create a connection to their original context of production the exhibition design transforms the darkened room at DesignLibrary into a theatrical stage-set drawn upon the floor plan of a prototypical modern Chinese household, a symbolic remake of a changed sense of domestic, private space in contemporary urban society. This built form realized as an abstract structure of white walls (polystyrene) and floor lines as seen in architectural drawings, is a calculated reproduction of an 80 sqm apartment with a small night garden. By wondering these rooms the visitors are taken into a filmic detour into the personal life and visual histories behind the designers while discovering the minutiae of everyday worlds in continuous change.
The Secret Life of Things in Chinese Art and Design
April 14 – 19, 2010
Salone Internazionale del Mobile – Milan Design Week | project of CDM 2010
Design Library | Milano, IT
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curator :: Beatrice LEANZA
exhibition design :: LI Naihan
catalogue design :: ourwork.is
Introduced within the framework of CDM 2010, the exhibition is conceived as a wondrous journey into contemporary object-scapes through the creative processes of a young generation of 30 Chinese independent designers, artists and studios as a way to explore both formally and conceptually the micro-fields of everyday life. This curatorial approach wishes to expose the multiple outreaches of design processes and research into a variety of crossdisciplinary practices and how these speak of a perception of the world and contemporary life, stretched into a continuous experimentation with its visual and material currency. The works and projects featured in the exhibition – ranging from products, furniture and lights to clothing, publication/illustration, sound and art objects, intend to inform of the shaping relationships between visual strategies in art, architecture and design and their implication with material processes of production that take the realm of the ‘ordinary’ as an ideal environment to continuously reinvent the cultural outfit of personal history into a process of performative innovation. The show highlights how these selected creative practices engage forms via strategies of subtle sabotage, appropriation, assemblage, where found shapes, materials and objects of everyday use are remoulded into a geography of whimsical ambiguity and disarming über-reality.
A selected series of books, artists’ catalogues and independent publications by Chinese graphic designers and studios are included as part of the exhibition.
featuring :: ACF, BANMOO, CENG Hong, CHEN Ke, Design MVW, DUAN Jianyu, DUOXIANG Studio, HC28, HOMESHOP, JIANG Jin, SHAN Lin by LEE Yao Studio, Naihan LI & CO, LIANG Yuanwei, LI Yonglin, LING & COMMA, MADE-IN / LEAP, MEWE Design, MORE LESS, OHO-OHO, PAPER WORKS by Jethro CHAN, PEP Art + Design, RAINBOW, Tom SHI Design, SUBjam, WANG Bin, WANG Yifan, XIAOmage + CHENGzi, XIE Dong, XYZ Design, YAANG by WANG Yang, YANG Jun, ZHANG Dandan, ZHENG Guogu, ZIZAOSHE by SONG Tao
main organizers :: Rizzoli Beijing (RCS Media Group), BIDC (Beijing Industrial Design Centre)
in collaboration with :: Lenovo & Alessi
art direction :: BAO Atelier
